Here’s a quiz question. You are told to attend a six-person meeting; four will be in the office, two joining via video. How many people are in the meeting? Yes, this is a trick question. The answer is seven because there will also be an AI note-taker joining.
This has become increasingly common, with many offices using the likes of Notion, Otter, Fireflies or Granola, or their existing video software such as Zoom or Teams, to record all meetings. Sometimes this takes the form of an annoying bot in the corner of the screen, or it can just be a message saying “this meeting is being recorded”. Even if everyone is in the office, someone will turn on their laptop and tap the icon to ensure it is being logged, transcribed and summarised.
For some, this is proof of how large language models are making our working lives significantly more productive. Why spend the meeting attempting to take handwritten notes (which you struggle to decipher afterwards), or tapping away into a laptop, rather than engaging in the discussion? A machine can do it for you and — even better — produce a crisp, clear summary of what everyone said, and even suggest “action points” to follow up afterwards. Was it Julie or Juan who came up with the disastrous idea to axe the free coffee for staff? You now have evidence.
It is hard to know exactly how many meetings are now being recorded, but Roam, an American company that makes software for remote offices, tells me on average 25 per cent of its users’ online calls are being recorded, up from 12 per cent at the start of 2025. It is becoming a huge market — Granola, based in London, finished a funding round last month, valuing the company at $1.5 billion. Fireflies is also worth over $1 billion.
I use AI transcription software when I am interviewing people and find it invaluable, saving me enormous amounts of time even when the transcription is ropey, as it often is.
There are, however, some serious problems with inviting AI note-takers into our meetings, beyond the niggling concern that people will avoid voicing difficult opinions, if they know every throwaway remark is being recorded.
The key one is privacy. The rules about recording meetings are not black and white in the UK. It is perfectly legal, in many cases, to record people without permission. It’s what you do with that recording afterwards, and whether you share it, that gets you into hot water.
Most companies believe that a simple “this meeting is being recorded” is enough to cover themselves. But when does the recording start and when does it end?
On X there’s a user called Nikita who recently pointed out that if you join Google Meet three minutes before the start of the scheduled meeting, everyone else’s virtual note-takers join early too. You can then spend a few seconds screaming, claiming you’re on the Titanic, that you’ve just hit an iceberg and require immediate assistance. Once everyone else arrives, you behave as normal. At the end, everyone is emailed an AI summary with the top bullet point: “Nikita has hit an iceberg and is sinking fast. Suggested next steps: send a lifeboat.”
This is clearly mischievous fun, but I met someone recently who was shocked to be sent an email containing an AI summary of a meeting with an external client she had attended. Not only had she (perhaps naively) failed to realise the meeting was being recorded, but it had captured the conversation that took place after she had left the call, where they discussed how overrated she was. She was appalled, but didn’t want to jeopardise her contract by complaining.
No UK employment tribunal, to my knowledge, has featured someone claiming workplace harassment because the AI note-taker consistently made them sound like an idiot in meetings, but it’s only a matter of time.
There is a possibly more important issue with this technology. Namely, it doesn’t lighten the crushing burden that meetings impose on us. I have been looking into this topic for The Sunday Times Magazine for a piece that is being published this weekend. The average UK worker attends 12.6 meetings every week, up from eight back in 2019 before Covid. That’s according to Fellow, a Canadian software company that, yes, records, transcribes and summarises meetings, and analyses thousands of its users’ calendars. Though meetings have got shorter, the average office worker is still spending nearly a quarter of their working week in a meeting, up from a fifth of their time before Covid.
Has UK productivity increased during this time? Of course it hasn’t. What has increased is the ease with which we can now host and attend meetings, thanks to video conferencing. A decade ago, few executives would say to a client, “let’s jump on the train at 3pm this afternoon to meet for 15 minutes.” Now, “hopping on a call” at a few hours’ notice is standard practice.
AI note-taking is not to blame. Some of the technologies I came across are attempting to make meetings better. Meeting Canary, designed in the UK, alerts the boss — or whoever is in charge — if they are failing to include the opinions of certain attendees and whether the agenda is being followed. AI note-takers are becoming more than just silent secretaries in the corner, some are now firm-handed moderators, ensuring things run smoothly.
But it is in no one’s interest — certainly not that of the multibillion AI note taking industry — to design software to say: “Are you sure this meeting is really necessary?”
Because in many cases it isn’t. As so often, AI isn’t really helping us work better, it’s just helping us work more.
Harry Wallop is a consumer journalist and broadcaster. Follow him on Twitter @hwallop